“The Struggle Is Over, the Wounds Are Open”: Cinematic Tropes, History, and the RAF in Recent German Film

Abstract

Recent German films have taken up questions of terrorist violence in ways distinct from an earlier wave of cinematic representations.1 Andres Veiel's 2001 documentary Black Box BRD signals one articulation of the representa tional shift relative to broader questions about history and film. The tension in Veiel's work between the aesthetics of film form and the politics of personal and public memory opens up a new and potentially productive window for understanding West Germany's experience of terror and its commemoration by state authorities, former terrorists, sympathizers and accused sympathizers, victims of terrorism, as well as the families of both terrorists and victims. Roughly since the official dissolution of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1998, the waxing interest in German terrorism and terrorists has frequently found cinematic expression in Germany. Whereas filmic engagements with terror thirty years ago dramatized the perspectives of (alleged) terrorists, sympathizers, or suspected radicals to highlight a political climate of fear and mistrust rather than specific terrorist acts and their consequences (e.g.,